You are here

Chloé Delaume

Biography

Chloé Delaume from a photograph by Coxalgie (2010) [Wikimedia Commons]

Chloé Delaume was born Nathalie Abdallah in Versailles on 10 March 1973 of a French mother and a Maronite Lebanese father. She grew up in Beirut, at the time a war zone, before returning to France in 1978. The family settled in the suburbs of Paris, where Delaume’s mother taught French in a collège, and her father worked as a captain in the merchant navy. After her father obtained French nationality, the family name was changed to Dalain.

In 1983, at the age of ten, she witnessed her father shooting her mother dead and then kill himself, a traumatic event which lies at the core of Delaume’s work. She addresses the issue directly in Le Cri du sablier, where the narrator literally attempts to empty herself of her father’s lethal legacy (a grain of sand, hence the hourglass in the title).

Following the crime that left her orphaned, she lived with her grandparents, and uncles and aunts. During the 1990s Delaume enrolled for a degree in Lettres Modernes at Nanterre University (Paris X). She began a Master’s degree intending to write her dissertation on the subject of ‘Pataphysique chez Boris Vian’, but did not complete it. In several of her novels and in her constantly evolving biography, available on her website (www.chloedelaume.net), Delaume intimates that this period of her life, from late childhood to her beginnings as a writer, was marked by several suicide attempts. The struggle against depression is one of the recurrent motifs in Delaume’s work, along with autofiction, family tragedy, virtual reality and technologies of the self.

Having left Nanterre in the late 1990s, Delaume worked in an escort bar, an experience that served as the backdrop for her first novel Les Mouflettes d’Atropos. At the same time, she started writing articles for the magazine Le Matricule des anges (at first under her real name) and became a regular contributor to the literary journal EvidenZ, which she co-founded with among others, the philosopher and author Mehdi Belhaj Kacem (to whom Delaume was married from 1999 to 2002).

It is around 1999 that Chloé Delaume came into being as a persona and since then she has been squatting in Dalain’s body: ‘Je m’appelle Cholé Delaume. Je suis un personage de fiction. J’ai investi le corps que j’ai fait mien un vendredi poisseux de 1999’ (La Vanité des somnabules). She takes her first name from Boris Vian’s heroine in L’écume des jours and her last from Antonin Artaud’s rewriting of Alice in Wonderland (La Larve et laume), thus placing herself in a literary heritage. The choice of a new identity underlines the importance that fiction and experiments in self-narrative have for Delaume.

In several accounts, she describes this change of identity as something much more meaningful than the adoption of a pseudonym. Rather, it is an attempt not only to come to terms with the pain caused by her family’s tragedy, but also her own narrative, and to reinvent herself beyond sociocultural and familial determinism. In an interview with Barbara Havercroft, she explains how this new identity gave her the sense of being a subject for the first time: ‘Il était nécessaire de me créer une nouvelle identité, qui porterait mon propre Je, l’imposerait dans le réel. Se définir comme personnage de fiction, c’est dire je choisis qui je suis, je m’invente seule, moi-même, jusqu’à l’état civil. Je ne suis pas née sujet, mais par ma mutation en Chloé Delaume, je le suis devenue.’

Becoming a subject is according to Delaume the main purpose of her experimentation with the genre of autofiction. The subjectivity that she endlessly (re)constructs through her novels and performances is not a search for stability. As Shirley Jordan puts it, ‘Delaume engages in repeated autofictional self-repositioning’ (2012), which makes her autofictional practice closer to Foucault’s notion of ‘technologies of the self’ than a search for a coherent or ‘true’ identity. Delaume rapidly became a key figure in French autofiction, along with authors such as Christine Angot and Serge Doubrovsky, who coined the term. However, her inventive writing cannot be reduced to an exploration of the autofictional self. With her disrupted syntax and her particular use of punctuation marks, Chloé Delaume’s writing is characterised by deep poetic inflections.

Delaume’s first novel, Les Mouflettes d’Atropos, was published by Farrago in 2000, to be followed a year later by Le Cri du sablier for which she received the prestigious Prix Décembre. By 2014 she had authored a body of works comprising 22 books (several novels, theatre and short stories), poetry and an essay. Delaume’s interest in formal exploration makes her an heir of Queneau and the Oulipo group. This is obvious in some of her work, Corpus Simsi and J’habite dans la télévision, for example. In the latter, Delaume subjects herself to an experiment: spending 22 months in front of the television from morning until evening. She narrates the effects of this constant exposure to televisual content in a novel taking the form of a report. In Corpus Simsi, a book based on previous experiments with videogames and virtual reality, Delaume becomes a virtual character in Sim City.

In Dans ma maison sous terre, Delaume revisits her family story in the light of new information: her murderous father was not actually her biological father. This fact, disclosed by her maternal grandmother, results in Delaume rewriting her family romance. Où le sang nous appelle, written together with her current partner Daniel Schneidermann, revolves around Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, Delaume’s uncle, who has been in a French prison since 1982 for his involvement with Lebanese terrorist groups. Recently, Delaume confided in her interview with Havercroft her desire to (temporarily) turn her back on autofiction with the aim of exploring the space of ‘pure’ fiction.

Delaume is also the author of several short texts as part of collective projects. As a musician and occasional singer, she collaborates on the Dorine Muraille project and takes part in numerous performances. From 2005 to 2007, she was forum manager for the television programme Arrêt sur images on France 5 and, since 2010, has been general editor of the collection ‘Extraction’ published by Éditions Joca Seria.

None of her work has yet been translated into English, though some of her novels are available in German and Spanish.